DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA The danger of a 'dignified' exit from
Iraq By Tom Engelhardt
Things are always complicated. In the
Washington Post, for instance, James Mann, author
of Rise of the Vulcans, recently suggested
that it was far "too simplistic" to claim "the
appointment of Robert M Gates to replace Donald
Rumsfeld [represents] the triumph of Bush the
father's administration over Bush the son's".
Still, I prefer the analysis of Washington
Post reporter (and author of Fiasco) Thomas
Ricks. When asked by the Post's media
columnist Howard Kurtz
whether a Newsweek headline, "Father knows best",
was just "an easy, cheap Oedipal way for the press
to characterize what's going on", Ricks replied:
"Well, just because it's easy and cheap doesn't
mean it's wrong."
At a moment when every
version of the dramatic arrival of James A Baker
III as co-head of the Iraq Study Group (ISG) and
Robert Gates as US defense secretary on the scene
- and the scuttling of Rumsfeld's Titanic - is at
least suspect, it's still worth considering the
bare bones of what can be seen and known - and
then asking what we have.
Sooner or later,
failure has a way of stripping most of us of our
dreams and pretensions. So let's start with a tiny
history of failure. President George W Bush's life
trajectory of failing upward has had a rhythm to
it - and a rubric, "crony capitalism". Daddy's
friends and contacts helped him into and - after
he failed - out of the oil business, into and out
of the baseball business, into and now, it seems,
out of the failed game of global politics.
"His is," as the Boston Globe's Michael
Kranish and John Aloysius Farrell put it in 2002,
"the story of a man who struck out numerous times
before being bailed out by big hitters who often
were family members, friends or supporters of his
father."
It's appropriate, then, that the
man who bailed him out in Florida when he in
essence lost the presidency in 2000, Bush family
consigliere Baker, would reappear six years
later, in the wake of another failed election, to
bail him out again now that he has screwed up the
oil heartlands of the planet. Daddy - we're
talking here about former president George H W
Bush - has three adopted boys: his former national
security adviser (and alter ego) Brent Scowcroft,
who went into opposition to the younger Bush's
Iraq policy even before the invasion of 2003 and
now lurks quietly in the wings; his former Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Gates; and
Baker.
Like Daddy, Gates was deeply
involved in, but never indicted for, his dealings
in the scurrilous Iran-Contra affair, was later
involved in the tilt toward and arming of Saddam
Hussein's Iraq against Iran, pioneered fertile
territory in the late 1980s in terms of
manipulating intelligence in the debate over the
nature of Mikhail Gorbachev's Soviet Union, had a
hand in the Gulf War of 1991, and most recently
held the presidency of Texas A&M University,
where he was the keeper of the flame for Daddy's
library. Could you ask for a better insider CV for
taking over the Pentagon from one of Bush the
elder's rivals in the Gerald Ford era, Rumsfeld?
We don't know how all this happened, but a
little speculation never hurt anyone. Congress
mandated the ISG to come up with some new
recommendations for Iraq policy last March. Baker
and co-chair Lee Hamilton began work in April.
Iraq has been in an ever more horrific and
bloodthirsty spiral downward ever since.
Yet the ISG has still delivered nothing
but promises of recommendations - which Baker and
others continue to swear will be no "magic" or
"silver" bullet - some time in December or even
January. In March, Baker insisted on getting the
president, who initially seemed reluctant, to sign
on personally. But the question is: What happened
over the past eight months as Iraq boiled?
I think we have to assume - and a cover
piece in Time seems to confirm this - that Baker,
a distinctly hard-nosed guy, never intended to
present a bunch of suggestions that Rumsfeld could
simply shoot out of the skies and so was stalling
until his departure. (Time quotes a "Gates aide"
as saying, "Baker wasn't going to let his report
come out so that Rummy could stomp all over it.")
Assumedly, he knew that if his group took
long enough, Rumsfeld would be gone and a
secretary of defense more to his liking in place.
Hence the distant date for delivering "solutions".
It has been, in essence, a stall. Everyone
involved has claimed, of course, that Bush Sr had
nothing directly to do with all this and that
Baker didn't even know, until the last second,
that Rumsfeld was about to fall like a brick. I'd
be surprised if that story lasted out the month.
In fact, what we're seeing undoubtedly
adds up to something more than Iraq-policy
recommendations - possibly even a genuine purge of
most of the remaining neo-conservatives and their
allies (who are also in the process of, as ex-CIA
analyst Ray McGovern has written, eating their
own). At the Pentagon, rumor has it, the leftover
neo-cons, many of them allies of Vice President
Dick Cheney, are just waiting for their dismissal
notices when Gates steps aboard. All this seems
aimed at leaving the Vice President's Office
increasingly isolated and Cheney himself
sidelined.
Some day, when the full story
is in, we're bound to be riveted. After all, Baker
has managed in these months to gather in the wings
something like an alternative State Department,
National Security Council and CIA-in-waiting in
the shell of the ISG, which is filled with old
movers and shakers going back to the Ronald Reagan
administration. (He has even begun to conduct
something akin to his own foreign policy, meeting
with the Syrian foreign minister and Iran's
ambassador to the United Nations, both no-nos for
the Bush administration.)
The 10 key ISG
members, in fact, are largely not military
strategists or geopolitical thinkers of a sort who
might be expected to offer Iraq solutions. They
are instead a who's who of establishmentarianism,
extending back to the Reagan era.
Is this
a major shift in Washington? You bet. How big
remains to be seen. But here's the real question:
Can the new crowd - even if the president bows
down to Daddy's Boys, which is hardly a given -
get the US out of Iraq? Do they even want to? At a
moment of such flux, with a new Democratic
Congress and growing public pressure for a genuine
Iraq exit strategy, what kind of gates will the
Gates nomination actually open?
When is
an 'exit' not the way out? Let's start
with one sure side-effect of the Gates nomination
and the extended delivery schedule of the ISG. It
buys time from election-driven pressure for
whatever administration is in formation. We
now have to wait for the Gates confirmation
hearings; the ISG recommendations (and possibly
those from an alternative White House version of
the same); endless consideration of them; and,
barring an unlikely flat turn-down from an
increasingly cornered administration, the time to
implement those policies and check out the results
(which are guaranteed to be deeply disappointing,
if not disastrous). Six months to a year could
easily pass before it becomes obvious to Americans
that we're not really heading out of those Iraqi
gates.
If you happen to have lived through
the Vietnam era, then think of this as the
beginning of the season of non-withdrawal
withdrawal gestures. The key word right now is
"redeployment", something Senator Carl Levin, who
will soon take over the Armed Services Committee,
is pushing hard. His modest drawdown plan,
however, is not even meant to begin for another
four to six months and offers no timetable or any
particular end in sight. Levin does, however, make
it clear that redeployment and departure are two
different creatures. In the form of some kind of
military advisory group (not to speak of the
United States' massive new embassy in the heart of
Baghdad and a few of the massive bases it has
built), he expects the US to be in Iraq into the
distant future.
We don't, of course, know
exactly what plan the ISG will offer, but all
reports on its deliberations suggest that, while
public expectations are soaring, the actual
recommendations "may sound familiar". Actually,
they may sound that way because the proposals the
group seems to be considering are indeed
remarkably familiar.
These range from a
bulking up of US troop strength by 10,000-40,000
more soldiers to a far more likely scenario
described by Neil King Jr, Yochi Dreazen and Greg
Jaffe in the Wall Street Journal just two days
after the election. This would involve a long-term
drawdown of US forces to the 50,000 level - still
20,000 more than Rumsfeld and pals hoped to leave
in-country only months after the taking of
Baghdad. Assumedly, these would largely be pulled
back into those permanent bases.
"The new
defense secretary is more likely to oversee a
shift of the US effort away from providing
security in urban areas such as Baghdad to a more
advisory role ... In such a scenario, the Pentagon
would turn big US units into quick reaction forces
to bail out Iraqi soldiers and advisers who get
overrun. Teams of American advisers who live and
work with Iraqi units would increase in number."
Recently, Julian Borger of the British
newspaper The Guardian summed up what's known this
way: The ISG "is also looking at various types of
troop deployment. Most probably it will suggest
pulling US forces out of the urban patrolling that
causes most of the casualties and regrouping in
bases in Iraq or in neighboring countries."
Along with this would go various forms of
pressure on the Iraqi government to step up
("benchmarks", but not perhaps the dreaded
"timetable" for withdrawal that Bush opposes so
vigorously). In addition, a regional conference of
neighboring states, the Europeans and the US would
be convened. Its task would evidently be to draft
Iran and Syria into the process of "stabilizing"
Iraq. (Having played a high-stakes game of chicken
with the Bush administration based on an
assessment of US power and seemingly won, the
Iranians, in particular, are unlikely to settle
now for what little the US administration might
offer in return for their help.)
Yes, the
presidential idea of "victory" or "success" will
be nowhere in sight, nor will an emphasis on
fostering "democracy" in Iraq - and further coup
rumors may proliferate. But all of this, however
palatable it may seem in Washington, will only add
up to a series of tactical, not strategic,
readjustments - most of which (minus that
conference) have already been tried in Iraq and
have only been so many benchmarks on the road to
catastrophe.
Before the November 7 US
election, an upsurge in violence in Iraq was
compared to the Tet Offensive "turning point"
moment in Vietnam. In fact, the past weeks bear no
particular relationship to that nationwide
Vietnamese campaign that saw bitter fighting all
over the country, even inside the US Embassy
compound in Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital.
But let's remember another, more telling aspect of
Tet. As a "turning point" in that conflict, it was
still followed by another seven years of war.
Almost as many Americans, and probably more
Vietnamese, died in the period after Tet as
before.
In the post-Tet period, we had to
live through a Senator Levin-style near-complete
withdrawal of US ground troops from Vietnam under
the pressure of a disintegrating army and rising
anti-war feeling at home, only to see the use of
US air power escalate dramatically to fill the
power gap.
Expect some modified,
scaled-down version of this Richard Nixon-era
"Vietnamization" program in Iraq. As early as last
November, Nixon's secretary of defense Melvin
Laird, who claims full credit for the strategy
(and still thinks it was a successful way to win
the Vietnam War in the face of increasing public
opposition at home), proposed a similar
Iraqification plan in Foreign Affairs magazine.
Now, its moment may be arriving.
Like
almost all strategies floating around Washington
at the moment, this is but another way to try to
hang on to some truncated but permanent imperial
presence at the heart of the oil lands of the
planet - and as such it is doomed. Unfortunately,
to make much sense of what an Iraqification policy
might actually mean, you need to be able to assess
two key aspects of the US Iraq venture that the
mainstream media in essence have not cared to
cover.
Permanent facts on the ground
As the New York Times revealed in a
front-page piece by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt
on April 19, 2003, just after Baghdad fell, the
Pentagon arrived in the Iraqi capital with plans
already on the drawing board to build four massive
military bases (that no official, then or now,
will ever call "permanent").
Today,
according to the former secretary of defense, the
US has 55 bases of every size in Iraq (down from
more than 100); five or six of these, including
Balad Air Base, north of Baghdad, the huge base
first named Camp Victory adjacent to Baghdad
International Airport, and al-Asad Air Base in
western Anbar province, are enormous - big enough
to be reasonable-sized US towns with multiple bus
routes, neighborhoods, a range of fast-food
restaurants, multiple shops, pools, mini-golf
courses and the like.
Though among the
safest places in Iraq for American reporters,
these bases have, with rare exceptions, gone
completely undescribed and undiscussed in the US
press (or on the television news). From an
engineering journal, we know that before the end
of 2003, several billion dollars had already been
sunk into them. We know that in early 2006, the
major ones, already mega-structures, were still
being built up into a state of advanced
permanency.
Balad, for instance, already
handled the levels of daily air traffic one would
normally see at Chicago's ultra-busy O'Hare and in
February its facilities were still being ramped
up. We know, from the reliable Ed Harriman, in the
latest of his devastating accounts of corruption
in Iraq in the London Review of Books, that, as
you read, the four mega-bases always imagined as
the United States' permanent jumping-off spots in
what Bush administration officials once liked to
call "the arc of instability" were still
undergoing improvement.
Without taking the
fate of those monstrous,
always-meant-to-be-permanent bases into account -
and they are, after all, just about the only
uniformly successfully construction projects in
that country - no US plans for Iraq, whatever
label they go by, will make much sense. And yet
months go by without any reporting on them
appearing. In fact, these past months have gone by
with only a single peep (that I've found) from any
mainstream publication on the subject.
The
sole bit of base news I've noticed anywhere made
an obscure mid-October appearance in a Turkish
paper, which reported that the US was now building
a "military airport" in Kurdistan. A few days
later, a United Press International report picked
up by the Washington Times had this: "Following
hints US troops may remain in Iraq for years, the
United States is reportedly building a massive
military base at Arbil, in Kurdish northern Iraq."
Kurdistan has always been a logical
fallback position for US forces "withdrawing" from
a failed Iraq. But so far nothing more substantial
has been written on the subject.
There is,
however, another symbol of US "permanency" in Iraq
that has gotten just slightly more attention in
the US press in recent months - the new embassy
now going up inside Baghdad's well-fortified Green
Zone and nicknamed by Baghdadis (in a sly
reference to Saddam Hussein's enormous,
self-important edifices) "George W's Palace".
It's almost the size of Vatican City, will
have its own apartment buildings (six of them) for
its bulked-up "staff" of literally thousands, and
its own electricity, well-water and
waste-treatment facilities to guarantee "100%
independence from city utilities", not to speak of
a "swimming pool, gym, commissary, food court and
American Club, all housed in a recreation
building" and its own anti-missile system.
Harriman tells us that it's a
billion-dollar-plus project - and unlike just
about every other construction project in the
country, it's going up efficiently and on
schedule. It will be the most imperial embassy on
the planet, not exactly the perfect signal of a
sovereign Iraqi future.
Again, few in the
US have had much to say about the embassy project,
a rare exception being an August Dallas Morning
News editorial, "Fortress America: New embassy
sends wrong message to Iraqis" that denounced the
project: "America certainly needs a decent,
well-defended embassy in Baghdad. But not as much
as ordinary Iraqis need electricity and water.
That our government doesn't seem to understand
that reality could explain a lot about why the US
mission is in such trouble."
Of course, as
we learned in Vietnam, even the most permanent
facilities can turn out to be impermanent indeed
and even the best-defended imperial embassy can,
in the end, prove little more than a handy spot
for planning an evacuation. But if the ISG doesn't
directly confront these facts on the ground (as it
surely won't), whatever acceptable compromises it
may forge in Washington between an embedded
administration and a new Congress, things will
only go from truly bad to distinctly worse in
Iraq.
The uncovered war Here's
another mystery of Iraq (and Afghanistan)
coverage: the essential US way of war - air power
- has long been all but completely absent. There
has been not a single mainstream piece of any
significance on the air war these past years, with
the single exception of journalist Seymour Hersh's
remarkable December 2005 report "Up in the air" in
The New Yorker. ("A key element of the drawdown
plans, not mentioned in the president's public
statements, is that the departing American troops
will be replaced by American air power. Quick,
deadly strikes by US warplanes are seen as a way
to improve dramatically the combat capability of
even the weakest Iraqi combat units.") It is, of
course, an irony that the only American reporter
to look up and notice all those planes,
helicopters and drones overhead has never been to
Iraq.
Such modest coverage of the air war
in Iraq as exists in the US press generally comes
in the form of infrequent paragraphs buried in
wire-service roundups as in a November 14
Associated Press piece headlined, "US general
confronts Iraqi leader on security":
On Monday night, US forces raided
the homes of some [Muqtada al-]Sadr followers,
and US jets fired rockets on Shula, their
northwest Baghdad neighborhood, residents said.
Police said five residents were killed, although
a senior Sadr aide put the death toll at nine.
The US military said it had no comment.
This incident assumedly took place
somewhere in the vast Baghdad slum of Sadr City.
In other words, we're talking about US planes
regularly sending rockets or bombs into relatively
heavily populated urban areas. All you have to do
is imagine such a thing happening in a US city to
grasp the barbarism involved. And yet over these
years in which such targeting has been commonplace
and, in larger campaigns, parts of such cities as
Najaf and Fallujah have been destroyed from the
air, hardly a single reporter has gone to an air
base such as Balad and simply spent time with
American pilots.
Not surprisingly, this
remains a non-issue in this country. How could
Americans react, when there's no news to react to,
when there's next to no information to be had -
which doesn't mean that information on the United
States' ongoing air campaigns is unavailable. In
fact, the US Air Force is proud as punch of the
job it's doing; so any reporter, not to speak of
any citizen, can go to the USAF website and look
at daily reports of air missions over both Iraq
and Afghanistan. The report of last Wednesday, for
instance, offers the following:
In Iraq, US Marine Corps F/A-18s
conducted a strike against anti-Iraqi forces
near Ramadi. The F/A-18s expended guided bomb
unit-31s on enemy targets. Air force F-16
Fighting Falcons provided close air support to
troops in contact with anti-Iraqi forces near
Forward Operating Base McHenry and Baqubah. Air
force F-15E Strike Eagles provided close-air
support to troops in contact with anti-Iraqi
forces near Baghdad. In total, coalition
aircraft flew 32 close-air-support missions for
Operation Iraqi Freedom. These missions included
support to coalition troops, infrastructure
protection, reconstruction activities and
operations to deter and disrupt terrorist
activities.
This was a pretty typical
day's work in recent months; there were 34 strikes
on November 14, 32 on the 13th and 35 on the 12th
- and note that each of the strikes mentioned was
"near" a major city. These reports can be hard to
parse, but they certainly give a sense, day by
day, that the air war in Iraq is no less ongoing
for being unreported.
Here's the crucial
thing: US troop levels simply cannot be slowly
drawn down in Iraq without - as in Vietnam - some
increase in the use of air power. And yet you can
look far and wide and find no indication of any
public discussion of this at the White House, in
Congress or in what we know of the deliberations
of the ISG.
And yet as the Iraqi chaos and
strife grow while the American public increasingly
backs off, air power will be one answer. You can
count on that. And air power - especially in or
"near" cities - simply means civilian carnage. It
will be called "collateral damage" (if anyone
bothers to call it anything at all), but - make no
mistake - it will be at the heart of any new
strategy that calls for "redeployment" but does
not mean to get the US out of Iraq.
'A
true disaster for the Iraqi people' On the
American Broadcasting Co's Sunday political talk
show This Week, White House chief of staff
Josh Bolten had this to say: "I don't think we're
going to be receptive to the notion there's a
fixed timetable at which we automatically pull
out, because that could be a true disaster for the
Iraqi people."
With hundreds of thousands
of dead and more following daily, it makes you
wonder exactly what it has been like so far for
the Iraqi people, as Bolten sees it. But perhaps
he's right; perhaps the disaster behind the US
will be nothing compared with the disaster ahead,
especially if Daddy's Boys, the ISG, other
Democratic and Republican movers and shakers, and
all those generals and former generals floating
around decide that this isn't the moment to
rediscover a Colin Powell-style "exit strategy",
but "one last chance" to succeed by any definition
in Iraq. Then, God help us - and the Iraqis.
Sooner or later, the US will undoubtedly be gone
from a land so determinedly hostile to being
occupied, but that end moment could still be a
long, long time in coming.
Here, for
instance, is Gates' thinking 18 months ago in a
seminar at the Panetta Institute at California
State University in Monterey on "phased troop
withdrawals" from Iraq:
But Mr Gates qualified his comments,
noting it sometimes takes time to accomplish
your goals. Sixty years after the end of the
Second World War, "there are still American
troops in Germany", he noted. "We've had troops
in Korea for over 50 years. The British have had
troops in Cyprus for 40 years ... If you want to
change history, you have to be prepared to stay
as long as it takes to do the job.
So
hold on to your hats. Tragedy and more tragedy
seems almost guaranteed, and the Pentagon has just
submitted to Congress a staggering US$160 billion
supplemental appropriation request to continue its
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
American
dignity So far, what have the US invasion
and occupation of Iraq led to - other than a
staggering bloodbath, killing fields galore and a
secret landscape of detention centers and torture
chambers?
As a start, an already badly
battered Iraqi economy was turned into a looting
ground for Bush administration crony corporations
and thoroughly wrecked. (Tall Afar, for instance,
is considered a US "success" story when it comes
to security, though part of the city is now a
"ghost town" of rubble, and unemployment there is
estimated at almost 70%.)
The Iraqi
education system is in tatters; the medical system
in ruins; basic social and urban services almost
undeliverable; oil production barely up to
pathetic prewar levels (if present-day figures are
even real, which is in doubt); the position of
women now disastrous; child malnutrition on the
rise; and well over a million Iraqis have fled
their homes in a country of only 26 million
people.
In addition, national sovereignty
has been destroyed; the national police system is
on its last legs, its ranks well stocked with men
loyal to various murderous Shi'ite militias; a
Sunni insurgency rages ever more violently; a
Kurdish form of independence seems ever more
likely (though inconceivable to neighboring
states); corruption is rampant; and a central
government, whose sway doesn't reach most streets
in its capital, is now considered "the least
accountable and least transparent regime in the
Middle East". (The Interior Ministry alone
"reportedly employs at least 1,000 ghost
employees, whose wages amount to more than $1
million a month".)
Throw in the fact that
the Iraqi army the Bush administration has been so
intent on "standing up" is largely a Shi'ite one
(as fine Knight-Ridder reporter Tom Lasseter
discovered in October 2005 and New York Times
correspondent Richard A Oppel found only last week
in Diyala province, north of Baghdad). So if the
plan is to bulk it up further to create a modicum
of "stability" before departure, forget it. By its
nature, such a training program, even if
successful, is but a plan to generate an even more
murderous civil war.
Now, add in endless
months or years of non-withdrawal withdrawal
plans, keep in mind the likelihood that US air
power will be ratcheted up, and you have a formula
for further carnage, collapses and disintegrations
of every sort, coups, assassinations, civil war
and God knows what else.
In the Vietnam
era, Nixon went on a well-armed, years-long hunt
for something he called "peace with honor". Today,
the catchword is finding an "exit strategy" that
can "salvage US prestige". What we want, it seems,
is peace with "dignity". In Vietnam, there was no
honor left, only horror. There is no American
dignity to be found in Iraq either, only horror.
In a Washington of suddenly lowered
expectations, dignity is defined as hanging in
there until an Iraqi government that can't even
control its own Interior Ministry or the police in
the capital gains "stability", until the Sunni
insurgency becomes a mild irritation and until
that US Embassy, that eighth wonder of the world
of security and comfort, becomes an eye-catching
landmark on the capital's skyline.
Imagine. That's all the US wants. That's
its dignity. And for that dignity and the imagined
imperial stability of the world, the United
States' top movers and shakers will proceed to
monkey around for months creating and implementing
plans that will only ensure further catastrophe
(which, in turn, will but breed more rage, more
terrorism that spreads disaster to the Middle East
and actually lessens US power around the world).
Now, the dreamers, the greatest gamblers
in the United States' history, are departing
official Washington and the "realists" have hit
the corridors of power that they always thought
they owned. It wouldn't hurt if they opened their
eyes. Even imperial defenders should face reality.
Someday, it's something we'll all have to do. In
the meantime, call in the Hellfire-missile-armed
drones.
Tom Engelhardt is editor
of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture. His
novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has
recently come out in paperback. Most recently, he
is the author of Mission
Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews
with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters
(Nation Books), the first collection of
Tomdispatch interviews.
